The words flashed on her computer late last year and tears instantly poured out.

More than two decades after her sister Paula Beverly Davis disappeared, Alice Beverly finally had found out what happened to her. The news came from a website known as NamUs, an acronym for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, which matches missing-person cases with unidentified human remains nationwide.

Even though she learned her missing sister had been murdered in 1987, Beverly says the news gave her some sense of closure.

"I just broke down crying instantly," she recalls. "It was like, 'We found her!' "

NamUs became fully operational last year and so far is credited with solving 17 cases, spokeswoman Michele Money-Carson says.

Davis vanished from Kansas City, Mo., in the summer of 1987. She was strangled, and her body left near a freeway outside Dayton, Ohio, hours after she was reported missing. But since no one in Ohio knew who she was, she was buried as a Jane Doe in an Ohio cemetery, Beverly says.

"We never gave up," Beverly says.

Davis' body will be exhumed from that cemetery today, another sister, Stephanie Clack, learned last week. She will be cremated in Ohio, and the sisters will bring her ashes back home to Missouri, Clack says.

The NamUs concept began with medical examiners, who called for a nationwide system in 2005 to provide a comprehensive site to help identify missing people, says Kevin Lothridge, CEO of the National Forensic Science Technology Center.

The Largo, Fla.-based center partners with the U.S. Department of Justice to operate the site under an agreement reached in 2007. It cost about $1.8 million to operate last year, Money-Carson says.

NamUs — at www.namus.gov— essentially has two sets of information. The first is known details of missing-person cases around the nation provided by law officers and relatives of the missing. The other is a database of unknown human remains in morgues across the country; details are entered by coroners and medical examiners.

It allows one-stop sleuthing for amateurs, families and police. Anyone can search and enter data they have on a missing person. Medical examiners can enter data on unidentified bodies, and anyone can search the database for potential matches, Money-Carson says.

In Las Vegas, Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy is among several coroners nationwide who worked on developing the system after a local site convinced him of its power to solve missing-person cases. In 2002, Clark County began posting details of unidentified bodies and human remains on its own website. Within hours, they had identified the first such case and eventually solved about 40 cases, he says.

Tips and leads came not only from relatives of victims, but also "armchair detectives," citizens who investigated cases on their own, he says. "I believe that the light of hope burns eternally bright," Murphy says. "We have 40 cases that indicate that it burns very bright."

"It's a great tool once people find out about it. Getting the word out is key," says Jim Shields, an Omaha police detective who learned about the site at a law enforcement conference. Shields recently worked with Iowa authorities to resolve the case of a missing person in Omaha whose remains were found outside of Des Moines.

A bill now in Congress could help fuel more use of the system. The legislation would authorize $10 million a year in grants for agencies to train employees to use NamUs and cover some data entry costs. It was passed by the House and is now in the Senate, says Francis Creighton, chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

Last October, Beverly and Clack were at home just outside Kansas City when they saw a NamUs public service announcement.

They logged on, and one of their searches resulted in 10 pages of records, she says. On the last page was case No. 985 — a description of their sister Paula Beverly Davis, including information about tattoos of a unicorn and a red rose.

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